Faraway: A Suburban Boy's Story as a Victim of Sex Trafficking

By R. K. Kline & Daniel D. Maurer

When Kevin was fourteen years old, he was just starting to understand his orientation as a gay teen living in a suburb of St. Louis. Then he met someone who he thought was his friend. This man was no friend. Instead, he coerced Kevin into child prostitution.  During this difficult time, Kevin befriended two boys also trapped in the thinly concealed underworld of sex tra fficking. What he found surprised him – these friends gave him a gift that nearly forty years later has continued to shape his life. Co-written by Rev. R.K. Kline and author Daniel D. Maurer, this book is not only Kevin’s memoir, but also a tribute to friendships that can shape a person’s faith and worldview in the worst of situations. Dr. Ric Curtis and Dr. Anthony Marcus from the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City offer an analysis on how underage prostitution has changed over the years and what remains the same.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hillcrest Media Group
• Release date: May 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781634132091

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Authors

Acknowledgments

Iwould like to take this opportunity to thank the people who were important in helping me to get to the place where I am today.

First, to Dan, who was one of the first to help me realize that mine was a story that people needed to hear. Without his writing skills this book wouldn’t have been possible. To Dr. Gwen Sayler, who invited me to speak to the students and faculty of Wartburg Theological Seminary. This experience conveyed a feeling of honor and self-worth I’d never felt before.

To our editor Rebecca Ninke: I couldn’t think of a better person to edit our work, especially one who is nearly as salty as I am. I would also like to thank my psychiatrist, Lyle Herman, who helped me walk to places I never thought I’d have the courage to go.

To Pastor Anita Hill, who will always be not just a hero, but also a champion to countless LGBTQ leaders in the ELCA. To Tim Feiertag, who has been a hero of mine from way back. He was on the front lines early on in the struggle for LGBTQ rights in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and a dear friend of mine.

I also want to thank my kid, Scotty G. I could not have asked God to give me a better son than you. Our wounds come from different sources, but we’ve done well. I love you, kiddo. Also, thanks go to God, who was there for me in the darkest places. Finally, thanks to Stevie and Squirrel. I want the world to know you as I did. Stevie, you were my protector. Squirrel, you were—and will always be—my love.

PAX DOMINI

R. K. Kline

Kaneohe, Hawaii—August 2014

Foreword

By Daniel D. Maurer

When I first met Kevin at Wartburg Theological Seminary in 1994, I was impressed. What I mean is that he seemed like a cool guy who had it together. He could play a mean guitar, and we spent many evenings around a campfire with other guys in our class, singing Neil Young songs and delving deep into theological meanderings we pondered after having been in class together. For three years, I didn’t know he was gay.

At that point in my life, I was still undecided on the issue of homosexuality. I had grown up a straight man in the suburbs of Minneapolis with a good family. I was raised Methodist, but through marriage had become a devoted ELCA Lutheran—so much so that I decided to pursue theology in my graduate studies. After I had finished my undergraduate studies, I eventually applied for graduate school at Wartburg Theological Seminary in Dubuque, Iowa, where Kevin and I met. It’s not that I didn’t have any sense that there were gay people out there. It’s just that I didn’t see being gay as an issue of self-identity. Like many who don’t have experience personally knowing an out gay person, I was blind to the fact that sexual orientation doesn’t have anything to do with choice, but the way a person feels, deep inside. It’s the way he or she is born.

Kevin and I continued our friendship in school, but he never came out to me, probably because he didn’t feel safe revealing that side of himself to me. However, the education at Wartburg encouraged my searching. It helped, also, that LGBTQ justice had by that time become a topic of discussion. I looked at accepting people where they were at instead of trying to take biblical quotes as barbs to push them away. I looked also to the actions of Jesus. He was a person who always identified with the outcast, the forsaken. I finally came around.

I had finished a January interim study of the Reconciling in Christ movement within the church. The organization’s mission was the full participation of both laity and clergy who identified as LGBTQ. When I returned to graduate school, I felt refreshed and renewed, as if a great weight had been lifted. I no longer had to be a judge; that title belonged to someone greater than any of us. I also no longer saw same-sex attraction as an aberration or something that society needed to fix. I was an ally and I was happy to be one. I changed.

But being an ally in theory is different than being one in practice. I remember Kevin and I were sitting in a darkened Dubuque bar with some other guys in our class, drinking beer. There was a band up on the stage and the music was loud. I mentioned to Kevin that I thought the chick singing was hot (I was married at the time, but I still liked to look!).

Kevin looked directly at me and said, Hey, Dan ... you know I’m gay?

I was floored. No. I hadn’t known that. Not at all.

I guess Kevin’s coming out to me was a new link in the bonds of our friendship. That he would trust me enough to tell me who he was meant that I was on a more level playing field with our friendship.

We graduated from seminary and we each went to our respective first calls in serving as ordained pastors of the ELCA. Kevin went to Kansas. I went to western North Dakota. But we managed to keep in touch, and a few of us even got together several times in the next decade. In the meantime, I would fall hard in my addiction to alcohol and drugs. I suppose it was my own demon to bear. I struggled with depression and I didn’t want to be a pastor anymore. Through it all, Kevin was one friend who stuck with me. He encouraged me to seek treatment and gave me the tough love that I needed as a friend. After going through three treatments, I finally got sober in early 2011 at the Hazelden treatment center in Center City, Minnesota. Afterward, I moved to Saint Paul, Minnesota, with my wife and two boys.

By that time, Kevin had moved on from Kansas to Hawaii. (The lucky bastard.) We managed to call each other from time to time, but distance strained our relationship. One day when I was mowing the lawn, Kevin called me up and we chatted for a while, just catching up with news between us. He told me that he had been seeing a therapist and that he had been keeping a journal. He wanted me to read it. By this time, I had become a professional freelance writer and the thought of reading something as personal as a journal piqued my interest. Before we hung up, he told me that he would send the journal via e-mail. He told me to keep it to myself. And then he told me something that I wouldn’t forget, something that would remind me why we eventually came to write his story in a book: You’re never going to think of me in the same way.

Dismissing any thoughts that he had secretly killed someone or served as a CIA spy, I read his journal entries. In them, he recounted his experiences in the summer of 1975, how he was an underage male park hustler, and the story of his fellow hustlers Squirrel and Stevie. It was stunning, no doubt. But what Kevin didn’t realize was that I didn’t recoil out of horror or disgust. No. Instead, I was proud of him. It takes a lot to dig up your past. Then there was his relationship with Squirrel and Stevie. It was an angle I hadn’t known before. The depth of their relationship was more than only a passing connection. They shared a deep bond, which, considering their circumstances, was unique and precious. I suggested that we publish his stories as a memoir. He immediately dismissed it.

Then, Gwen Sayler, a professor at Wartburg Theological Seminary, suggested that Kevin give a talk at WTS on the subject of human trafficking. He accepted and it was a resounding hit. Students and professors filled the hall, and Kevin found there were others who wanted to know his story and how it related to the problem of trafficking human beings for sex. Dr. Sayler reiterated my suggestion that Kevin should publish his story. Also around that same time, Kevin established a connection with Drs. Ric Curtis and Anthony Marcus of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City; they also encouraged him to share his story.

Since then, Kevin has worked closely with me, as well as our editor, Rebecca Ninke, who has been invaluable in refining the story for readability.

It’s my hope that this book can not only be a wonderful story about the bond Kevin shared with Stevie and Squirrel, as well as a sobering meditation on the problem of sex trafficking, but that you also might see a story of hope—a theological statement proclaiming hope in the midst of tragedy and loss. Of particular interest to me is that readers know that sex trafficking not only affects girls and women, but also boys and men. In fact, the study Drs. Curtis and Marcus undertook reveals the hard fact that a large percentage of youth caught in trafficking are in fact boys. No other resource lets the public know about this fact. Kevin’s story, it seems, has played out again and again for boys through the years. It’s time that our ignorance of the problem ends. It’s time to tell Kevin’s story.

I encourage you to share this book with your friends and family, so that other boys need not suffer.

R.K. Kline, 1975.

The Gun

When I was sixteen years old, I thought I figured out how to solve all my problems.

All I needed was a gun.

Getting it was the issue. Even in the 1970s, the logistics of acquiring a gun were a challenge for a minor. My family didn’t have guns in our house in Florissant, Missouri. Besides, a sixteen-year-old suburban boy couldn’t just waltz into the neighborhood gun store and buy one. So I devised a plan.

My dad didn’t need much convincing to take me to the Hawken Shop in suburban St. Louis. The place sold antique, replica, and collector guns. It was the sort of store Davy Crockett could have walked into, fully dressed in his mountain man costume, and no one would have batted an eye. I was a bit of history buff, and since I knew my dad was too, I thought he would have less suspicion of my real motives—I told my old man I wanted a black powder cap-and-ball pistol. This made sense to him; it probably even seemed masculine in his eyes. I thought I was brilliant; I was proud for managing to get the gun with parental approval. What I didn’t consider was how it would make my dad feel to have bought the gun that his son used to shoot himself.

The gun was a replica of an 1860-something, Navy Colt .44 revolver with blued steel and a walnut pistol grip. I remember going home with it, holding it in my hands as I sat on the bed in my room. It felt heavy and powerful. Feeling the steel and the wood, smelling the gunpowder, I realized that it had the power to change a life in a second. Or end it. I wanted to change my life and end it, to stop the ache—forever. I wanted to kill myself with that gun.

But I couldn’t do it.

It’s not that I was chicken. Anyone who has considered suicide understands the appeal: no more never-ending hurt, no more shame, no more intrusive memories of evil faces and sad places. Living with the pain takes more guts than pulling the trigger. God knows I would have liked to have ended the suffering.

But something held me back. I wasn’t sure why then. Or now.

Instead of the gun, I numbed up with alcohol, black beauties, weed, and anything I could get my hands on. But the numbness was always temporary. Morning would come. And with the breaking light, as I’d lay on my bed with my eyes open, it would all come rushing back. The images in my head seemed to taunt me. I thought I’d never be free from them. I thought I’d never be the same as I was before the summer of 1975.

One night in the fall of ’77, I revisited my indecision. Nursing my new resolution with booze, I returned to my plan to stop the pain—it was time to check out. From a box in the bottom of my closet, I dug out the antique gun.

I drunkenly stumbled back to my bed and loaded up the gun, pouring in the gunpowder down the cold barrel. I remember the earthy, dank smell of the gunpowder. I remember the oily feel of the metal barrel of the gun. I took the ramrod, the thin metal rod used to load the gun, and stuffed the wad and the bullet in tight. I put the cold steel barrel in my mouth. It’s now or never, Kev. I pulled the trigger.

CLICK!

There, in the darkness of my bedroom, I mumbled a torrent of profanities to myself. And I realized what I had just done.

It turned out I was so drunk that I had neglected to place a percussion cap on the firing mechanism ... meaning the gunpowder didn’t ignite, and the bullet didn’t fire. Those ball-and-cap replicas take concentration to load correctly. Had I owned a modern revolver that required a simple bullet in the chamber, I would be dead. The nerdy appeal of the complex gun ended up saving my life. That, and the fact that I was drunk. The empty click of that hammer falling, echoing in my mouth, brought me to the sobering realization that I had